I do agree about multiplayer. People say it's a service, not the game. BS, I call. Games have had no DRM in multiplayer for years. It's all possible. And rarely do these "services" service anything. You run the game on your end, others connect to you, and never do you touch a system owned by the developer.

GOG is not 100% DRM-free. Multiplayer games are still games. And most of them have been scripted to require DRM to operate at all. And then they say it was needed it it was for a service.

Anyhow, we've all been down this road before. GOG should be diligent in protecting it time and privacy by eradication DRM, but also need to balance that with getting a library in here that folks can enjoy, which includes some DRMed multiplayer stuff.

But it's still better than any of the competition

I turned off GoG galaxy from auto-launching on start. Then, when I install games I grab the game .Exe from the game folder.

When a game is installed through Galaxy the desktop shortcut use to launch the game through the Launcher. Except in some games that the shortcut is just a traditional link of the game executable.

In any way, the normal behaivour is that the desktop shortcut lanches the Galaxy version, but into the game folder anoher shortcut exist, and that one launches the game without Galaxy.

The OP never mentioned offline installers installing Galaxy. That was a thing in the past - 2 types of offline installers, but that's not what this topic is about (it's about launching Galaxy when it's installed already).

In that case I agree that is a very bad move to "force"-link any offline installed games to current Galaxy client.

Why? Don't install Galaxy, and no linking happens. And even if you do have Galaxy installed, you can still play (single player) games without it.
Or are you still talking about those old "special" offline installers that had Galaxy included?

I have NOT Galaxy client installed. However Galaxy client might be very helpful when installing huge games. Have you read my first post?

I did. But how is helpful when installing huge games? When you've downloaded the offline installer, all it takes is double click the exe, agree, next, and the thing installs. Small or huge game, the installation process is the same.

OK.
Galaxy is required for GWENT (some players do love this game)
Galaxy is required to play multiplayer in some games (some players needed that as well)
Galaxy is good for downloading huge games (apparently only me). - And yes, the installation process is the same: just download several separate huge files through web browser.

Linking offline installers to installed Galaxy client is NOT good. That was my point.

Yes, I agree, Galaxy is handy as a 'download manager'*; but before you said "installing huge games", not "downloading huge games".

*I still like to use the old GOG Downloader program.

The only and truly DRM-free games are pirated games. >:D

There are other good features but Galaxy is very useful to have the games up to date and why not, for the cloud saves, and useful for those who have installed a decent number of games. Management.

For launching them you are free to use it or not.

Even running a DOS game with cloud saves without using the client, the next time you run Galaxy the saves are synced. Or at least try to do it.

There is a huge difference between asking devs to remove something, as in the DRM, and asking the devs to develop something from scratch just for you, as in add a multi-player that doesn't uses Steamwork, Galaxy or other MP platform. There are very few devs that still include LAN or direct connection support on recent game and you cannot expect those who don't to implement it for their Gog release; that's why before Galaxy most of the time the MP part of the game was simply disabled or used the devs own "DRM-ed" platform when one was available.

I agree. What sucks is it still seems hard to implement Galaxy multiplayer even now, unless devs are just being lazy or care less about GOG users because we're far fewer than Steam users.